A shocking discovery has been made in Ponchatoula, Louisiana. ?One of the largest collections of child pornography ever discovered?in the state– roughly half a million images- has been found on various electronic devices owned by one man.
I get regular updates on Louisiana news, and frankly, sometimes it is hard to surprise me. This story is pretty jaw dropping,though. Robert Swan, age 52, of Pontchatoula, Louisiana was caught with five hundred thousand child porn images on fifteen different electronic devices. He was actually pictured in some of the sexual acts against children, one as young as three. Let that number sink in though: Half a million DIFFERENT images of child pornography.
?Robert Swan is every parent’s worst nightmare,? Attorney General Buddy Caldwell said. Swan is being held on a 250,000 dollar bail, and due to an earlier conviction in Florida for lewd acts with a minor, is looking at 15 to 40 years in prison. He is also depicted in some of the images with an associate molesting a three- year- old girl back in 2010.
The hand wringing and excuses are already being made. People seem ready to express sympathy for his family, not to mention the number of people on the FB page of this article who claim to know the man personally and are expressing surprise. ?I worked with him, and he was so nice I would have never suspected,? reads one such message. Some of the children in the images were infants as young as four weeks old. When I see stuff like this, I often wonder, what do people expect a person like this to look like? Especially considering most of the guys who get caught with child porn tend to be middle aged white guys just like this one. Reasonably affluent or middle class, and often good church going pillars of the community. Considering the large number of digital devices this guy had images on, I am hard pressed to believe that no one knew what was going on. After all, this goes from being a sicko to the equivalent of drug kingpin status of kiddie porn.
What I find even more disgusting about this is that often, these people do not get a great deal of jail time, and when they do they immediately go into protective custody and spend their prison time relatively safe and protected. And while required to register as sex offenders when they leave prison, they often drop off the grid and disappear, only to reoffend pretty regularly. Some of you may remember when Rush Limbaugh got caught coming back from the Dominican Republic with some Viagra that was not prescribed to him. The Dominican Republic is a known sex tourism destination for wealthy Americans and Europeans to have sex with underaged victims. People on the Right begged everyone to respect Rush’s privacy. Um, yeah.
I am going to do some digging, but something tells me that this man (the guy with the kiddie porn) is probably very vocally against gay marriage. You know, for moral reasons. There are few crimes I would call for the death penalty in an unequivocal manner. This is one of them. Consuming, producing, or distributing child pornography should be an instant death sentence. These people have no place within any society, much less ours.
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